I promise I can see in the dark just fine. 
I need little to warm me; like an orchid,
I thrive in neglect. I promise that a buried rage 
like mine is enough to make blood run hot.
I no longer romanticize lightning. 
I no longer flinch at thunderclap.
I am the storm now, so I can’t 
be your foundation anymore, mother. 
You’re a prisoner to the past, remembering me 
before I was ancient columns of ruin. 
You have no idea the kind of power inherited 
in the underworld. Trust me: 
I’ll make a cathedral out of shards, I promise. 

[Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017), Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (Bowker, 2024), and This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder (Bowker, 2024). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere.  She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, a Douglas Preston Travel Grant recipient, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She received her MFA in poetry from Emerson College. ]